What is the feeling in the slipstream
of the dream, the one where you leave me,
go—to another woman, it seems—
and I call your phone over and over but
no matter how hard I punch the digits,
I cannot make you speak again?
I’m wandering in an empty city where
street names are carved on headstones.
I’m looking for a grave I cannot find.
Rain pours down in torrents. What is
the feeling? As if I’m made of tin, rain
beating on my shiny case, the sound
rolling round my empty interior. I ask
a lamppost where all the people have gone.
The lamppost replies: “There never were
any people, a world of fleshy people lying
in each other’s arms is a recurring dream
of tin people.”
So I lay my tin carcass in the rainy street
and as the rust eats into my hips and knees,
I dream of you and me lying in a bed
and of your left arm around me, even as
you slip away.
—Mary Noonan
Mary Noonan’s first collection, The Fado House, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Her second, Stone Girl, was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott International Poetry Prize.
